When Brown talks about ‘big’, he isn’t talking about size, or scale, or depth. It’s the totality of experiences that he—and ‘design thinking’—refers to.

And compared to the academic mode of critical thinking, designers can’t be any more different. “If critical thinking is about pulling initial parts apart in order to understand it from every perspective, then the other thing we do as designers is put things together and understand what they might be like,” he explains.